A means tested basic income solves best because it guarantees the largest payment – a UBI would shrink its size.
Hanna and Olken, 2018 - prof of South-East Asia Studies and prof of Economics at MIT [Rema and Benjamin, Harvard Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall “Universal Basic Incomes versus Targeted Transfers: Anti-Poverty Programs in Developing Countries” https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.32.4.201 Acc 6/12/23 TA]
Narrowly versus Widely Targeted Programs with a Fixed Budget If the government only cares about making sure the poor have access to transfers of some type, a universal basic income—which eliminates exclusion error entirely—may seem attractive. However, as we move to the right in Figure 4A, by raising the cutoff level c, more and more people become eligible for the transfer. If the total budget for the program is fixed, then the transfer given per-person falls as we move to the right on this curve. Therefore, moving to the right on the curve not only changes the tradeoff between exclusion error and inclusion error, but holding the total program budget fixed, also changes the amount given. Figure 4B shows this other aspect of the tradeoff, graphing the level of cash transfers disbursed per beneficiary under Indonesia’s BLT program and Peru’s Juntos program under different targeting schemes, as defined by different levels of the cutoff income c. The transfer level to eligible households steeply falls as you allow more people into the program. Again, the universal basic income can be thought of as the rightmost extreme point, with zero exclusion error and the smallest per-capita transfer for a given budget.